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Congratulations to NASBTT (National Association of School Based Teacher Trainers) and UCET (The University Council for the Education of Teachers) for setting up a joint venture. I am sure nobody will ask about whether they are now trainers or educators…

Image: Beirut Terraces / Herzog & de Meuron In the last few weeks I’ve had a lot of conversations with teachers and leaders in schools in challenging circumstances at both primary and secondary. A common experience has been the difficult process…

Recent figures showed a welcome increase in the number of permanent exclusions. This shows that schools are moving in the right direction, by putting the victims of the poor behaviour first. This invariably results in lots of very liberal people…

google search: motivational growth mindset posters. If you walk around a lot of schools these days and absorb the MESSAGE that emanates from the walls, you are likely to find yourself saturated by an oozing motivational cheeze-fest. (That’s a typo but…

Last week I was stuck on a train. I’d been to a school which has some great house names and, as I reflected on my own experience of house systems in various schools, I put out a casual tweet. Normally…

One of the biggest cultural changes in education that has happened since I trained to teach has been in attitudes to management. This impression has been somewhat re-enforced by some temporary work in independent schools (and a grammar school) where…

It seems that marking has become the enemy of the teacher. It takes hours, teachers spend their evenings and weekends lugging home huge bags of books and for little or no benefit when compared to other teacher feedback. I know…

Interestingly Amanda Spielman, Chief Inspector of Ofsted, is raising red flags around the narrowing of the curriculum in schools. According to Spielman, testing has become “inadvertently to mean the curriculum in its entirety” for some schools. What madness is this?…

After the pomp and ceremony of Tuesday afternoon in Oxford, yesterday afternoon was devoted to attendance at a seminar arranged by the Centre for Education Economics around the topic of ‘school funding and outcomes’. The seminar was chaired by the…

It helps every now and then to take a look back at the road travelled. The initial pioneers who set up Headteachers’ Roundtable, meeting at the Guardian Offices on the 12th October 2012, hopefully feel proud of the group they…

Yesterday afternoon I spent engaging in a series of events that skilfully blended the modern with the traditional. Oxford as a city seems quite good at such activities. The afternoon started with the Oxford Law Lecture. This was instituted some…

Here is a game to help develop your colleagues’ research literacy. Can you spot the bogus study? Can you generate a plausible cause-effect rationale? Ask someone to give you three numbers between 1 and 15. Using the handy table, you…